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Coming Soon
So, after like... three years of stalling, my Brian's a Bad Father ''review is currently with my editor. So, I guess the obvious question - why did this one take me forever? It's not one of the worst Family Guy episodes, a lot of people have asked me to do it (but not so much that it became incredibly overwhelming), and it's not a movie or a miniseries? Well... as you might have noticed, Family Guy episode reviews... actually take a ton of work. Episodes like ''Screams of Silence, or Peter-Assment, I need to pay special attention and word myself extra carefully. Not to mention all of the extra research that I need to do on tangential topics. Luckily, the only extra research I needed to do for this particular episode was watch The Former Life of Brian (nice title by the way)... oh yeah, and the deleted scenes on the DVD. Timing is incredibly important with a Family Guy review. I really wish that I'd waited until after Christmas Guy to review Life of Brian, for instance. On Family Guy DVD's, pretty much every episode comes with a set of deleted scenes. Most of them are alternative gags or cutaways that they didn't think was as funny as the ones that actually made it in the show. However, this episode's deleted scenes... are baffling. Basically, some of the deleted scenes have Brian and Dylan spending time together and Brian saying sorry for not being there. They removed these scenes to have Brian immediately, point-blank ask to be a writer on Dylan's show. I can only assume that it was to make Brian seem like more of an asshole. It was an editing move that I do not understand, especially because of the things they left in - namely Peter asking how to cut himself. When I review something like Spongebob ''or ''Teen Titans Go, I usually do have fun while doing it. There are exceptions, with episodes like One Coarse Meal ''or ''Pet Sitter Pat, but it can be really fun to riff on these shows (which is one of the reasons that I've done so many reviews on them in the past). But... Family Guy is just so mean-spirited that there is no pleasure in doing a Family Guy review, even ignoring the fact that Fox makes it painful to try and keep it up altogether. Why do I keep doing Family Guy ''reviews? Because, despite what the show says about "how you shouldn't get your lessons from television shows," people ''do listen to it. They know that people listen to it, or they wouldn't bother making episodes like Not All Dogs Go to Heaven or Screams of Silence or Brian's a Bad Father. I mean, this episode for instance - Brian's a Bad Father - most people know they have a moment where Peter asks how to cut himself to kill himself and they say how to do it. What most people don't seem to notice is that they have a gag earlier in the episode where they flatout say "you don't know who that is because you're fourteen." You know, an age group that's specifically prone to depression and self-harm. What am I supposed to think about that? What is anyone supposed to think about that? I get that it's not a show's responsibility if someone imitates what they do, but it becomes a different argument when they basically specifically tell people how to do destructive things. I don't get any pleasure from coming along to moments like this, or Brian's speech to Meg of how she should stay in an abusive relationship for the abuser's benefit, or Quagmire's speech to Brenda, where he says that she's not really a woman because she's the victim of domestic abuse. It goes beyond stupid. It goes beyond even "failing to be funny" because, in most of these cases, I don't think that they're trying to be funny. It doesn't really matter because comedy isn't a shield. There's a philosophical debate - do artists have a responsibility to the general public? And honestly, moments like these really bring that debate to the forefront in my mind. I mean... at the very least, I think that artists shouldn't give specific instructions on how to hurt themselves. That strikes me as... a bit irresponsible, and if whoever wrote that joke did it in literally any other context, they could be brought to court over it. I'm glad that I waited awhile to review this episode. I think I'm a lot better at wording things and navigating the mire of episodes like this than I was three years ago. It also helps that I went through the effort of writing and publishing a book. When you do that... Brian's words have a whole new layer of pissing you off. I mean, everything he says basically boils down to "I am the biggest case study in history of the Dunning-Kruger effect." But... I'm doing a review for a reason. Sorry, this episode just... really ticks me off in not-the-best ways. I try to stay cool for most of it, although there is a... lot of swearing. **** After this review, perhaps I'll go for something a little bit more... low-key. A breather episode. It's probably going to be another atrocity because the admirables that I want to do right now are held up by late DVD releases. Come on Nickelodeon, Spongebob season 9 has been over for a month now. And how long has Loud House season 1 been over? Since Christmas? Not that Cartoon Network has been any better at releasing DVD's as of late. So, might be a bit before I can tackle another admirable. Unless this show is any good: link Damn, this should have been in my Top 20 Best Theme Songs. Yeah... I've already started thinking about the 80's Worst list. Before really delving into 80's cartoons, my impression was that most shows were just there to sell toys and do nothing much beyond that. However, looking at what I'm getting myself into, my first impression of the decade in terms of animation - it was weird as hell. In both good and bad shows, everything was like fucking bizarre. I guess I shouldn't be surprised - it was the decade that brought us Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles after all - but I am. I guess the biggest surprise is just... how weird that it got. link What am I even looking at here? In a virtual world, we have people in cyber suits. A kid runs by with an R2-D2, riding on it like a motorcycle, and then everyone's fighting with lasers on transforming vehicles. It's not really a criticism... I'm just going to have an interesting time looking through these shows. Might find another Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, who knows? (I'm not doing another marathon immediately before the next list) Speaking of which, while working on the Worst 90's list, a few things have landed on my plate. I'm probably not going to do any of the candidates on the list that I didn't tackle. I mean, Kid n Play ''and ''Wacky World of Tex Avery are literally impossible for me to do a single-episode review on, and... I want to do something a little bit different anyway. **** In other news, I started a new thing - Cyana. I'm writing out the screenplay as if it were a twelve episode mini-series, because that's how I get my thoughts out. But it might end up becoming my second novel. It takes place in a steampunk world, following a girl with lightning powers (in a world with many people who have similar powers of varying elements) named Cyana in her quest to find her father, who had been captured by some old adversaries. We learn in the "pilot" that this guy may have done some pretty bad things in his past, emphasis on the "may." Much of the story is figuring out who he really is, who Cyana really is, and who to trust. But that's one New Years' Resolution done. I made a new thing. **** I also bought Dark Souls. Little did I know it wasn't exactly optimized for PC when it was ported. Even on the PC version, when they tell you the controls in-game, they still tell you the Xbox 360 controls. So, I bought an Xbox 360 USB controller so I can actually know what I'm doing. Lately, when it comes to playing video games, I've really been hungering for challenge. I've been doing things like Nuzlocke challenges in Pokemon, playing the super hostile series in Minecraft, I got all of the platinum relics in Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped. Twice. I got the Unobtainium achievement in Game Dev Tycoon, where you need to sell 100 million copies of a video game... without a publisher. And I've also been coming up with some of my own challenges. Like in Stardew Valley, try to have the perfect farm at your grandfather's first visit (like you had to before the game's update). In Scribblenauts for instance, I hate how easy the series has become. In the original game, the challenges were actually challenge (sometimes for the wrong reasons, like not letting you kill certain characters and not telling you that you can't kill characters, but still). So... I've been doing a challenge in the original - beat every single action level with only the same ten items: pickaxe, wings, rope, UFO, death, magnet, glue, metal box, snorkel, and air vent. I really wish that I had something to extinguish fires. I've also been trying to complete the item encyclopedia 100% in Recettear, which has... some of the hardest requirements to 100% in any video game I've ever played. First of all, some items are incredibly rare... and weirdly so. If you play Recettear, you will never take a backscratcher for granted ever again. They're really rare artifacts, found out of chests in only early levels. You need five of these to complete everything. Various enemies drop ingredients needed to fuse things to get some of these items. They vary from you only need 1 to you need 56 (I'm not kidding). Some of them are rare drops. Some ingredients are only dropped by bosses... a small percentage of the time. Most of the rarest items in the game are in a dangerous dungeon that even at max level will drain you of resources quickly. And then if you spend too long any particular floor (half of the game is a dungeon crawler), these things called will-o-the-wisps appear. Infinitely. They do between 200-400 damage. And you need to kill them for an ingredient called the salamander scale. And if you want to complete the encyclopedia 100%, which requires you to have at least one of every item in the game at least once, you need to get 28 salamander scales. They have a 4% chance of dropping from an enemy type that swarms you and does 200-400 damage. Good luck. But this is what a normal dungeon crawler would have you do. Recettear has added challenges. Some items you can only really get because people sell them to you. And then there are True Cards. Playing through the game - you unlock certain heroes. However, at the end of the game, the hero that you've used the most will give you their true card, which allows you to start New Game + with that hero. You can only get one per playthrough unless you start New Game +. These count towards 100% completion. There are seven of these (technically eight, but you get the eighth automatically). Keep in mind, most people say that Recettear is a hard game on its own. If they didn't give you a psuedo New Game + if you game over'd (if you lose, you start back on day 1 with all items and money you've gathered; it just restarts plot progress), then many people might never beat it. I mean... I can beat it without needing to reset, but... I've come to like challenge in video games. I'm not one of those people who's gonna say that "new games are way too easy" because I don't think that that's entirely true. Games are a lot less archaic and a lot less cheap, definitely. I prefer the challenges of Dark Souls or Recettear over say... Battletoads or Super Mario's lost levels. Also, there have always been easy games - Super Mario Bros 3 and Kirby's Adventure for the NES are really easy; the SNES has Yoshi's Island and ActRaiser (why do people find that game hard? It's not. At all, except the bullshit boss rush at the end). And today we have games like Super Hexagon, VVVVVV's challenge modes, Super Meat Boy, This War of Mine, Civilization Diety modes, and I hear that Breath of the Wild is like the hardest Zelda game since Majora's Mask. Don't get me wrong - some modern trends do piss me off - I keep needing to mod out the beginnings of Bethesda games, for instance, but difficulty or lack thereof isn't one of them I've played so many video games in so many genres - I consider myself a ludophile, the video game equivalent of a bibliophile. Like, I do play everything from text adventures from the early 1980's like Zork I, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Alter Ego to modern survival games, like Don't Starve and Project Zomboid, and everything in between, with pretty much every genre. (The only genre I'm not too keen on is sports, because that genre has specific problems the same game every year). There really isn't much else for me to do besides push myself in all kinds of weird ways, and push the games themselves to their breaking point to see what really is possible, learning new ways to make them interesting, and think of new kinds of puzzles entirely. And I'm pretty sure you'll hear about this when I complete something like the Majora's Mask 3-day challenge or something. Category:Miscellaneous